Cave Hunting / Researches on the evidence of caves respecting the early inhabitants of Europe

by William Boyd Dawkins

Cave in Monmouthshire.

King Arthur’s cave,[189] on the side of a beautifully wooded knoll, overlooking the valley of the Wye, near Whitchurch, in Monmouthshire, explored by the Rev. W. S. Symonds in 1871, is a hyæna den, like that of Kirkdale, containing the gnawed remains of the lion, Irish elk, mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, and reindeer. Flint flakes, however, occurred in the undisturbed strata, which prove that it was also the resort of man. Mr. Symonds believes that the sand and gravel inside were deposited by the Wye, at a time when it flowed 300 feet above its present course, or before the valley was cut down to that depth. If this conclusion be true, the date of the occupation must be separated from the present day by a vast interval, which is only to be measured by the subsequent erosion of the valley by the slow operation of the subaerial agents, running water, ice, snow, and carbonic acid.

The only remains of the mammoth which I have examined belong to young individuals, and consist of the second and third milk-molars, a fact which I have very generally observed in hyænas’ dens. The older mammoths would not fall an easy prey to so cowardly an animal. The cave had also been inhabited by man after the pleistocene age, for coarse pottery of the neolithic kind, and flint flakes, were dug out of an upper stratum, while I was watching the excavation, in company with the Rev. W. S. Symonds, and the “Wanderers” field club.

Caves of Gloucestershire and Somersetshire.

The outliers of mountain limestone, on the southern side of the Bristol Channel, have long been known for their ossiferous caverns and fissures. From a fissure in Durdham Down,[190] near Bristol, Mr. J. S. Miller obtained fragments of bones, about the year 1820, and among them Dr. Buckland notices the fossil joint of the hind-leg of a horse, the astragalus being held in natural position, between the tibia and the calcaneum, by stalagmite. Subsequently a large series of animals of the same species as those of Gower were discovered in it by Mr. Stutchbury, and are preserved in the Bristol Museum.

Caves of the Mendip Hills.

The caves of the Mendip Hills were known to contain bones as early as the middle of the eighteenth century, when that of Hutton,[191] near Weston-super-Mare, was discovered in working the ochre and calamine which fills some of the fissures. The miners having opened an ochre pit, south of the little village of Hutton, discovered a fissure in the limestone full of good ochre, which they followed to a depth of eight yards, until it led into a cavern, the floor of which was formed of ochre, with large quantities of white bones on the surface, and scattered through its mass. Dr. Calcott describes the bones as projecting from the sides, roof, and floor of the excavation in such quantities as to resemble the contents of a charnel-house. Subsequently it was fully explored by the Rev. D. Williams, and Mr. Beard, of Banwell.

We owe the exploration of the neighbouring caves of Banwell, Sandford Hill, Bleadon, Goat’s Hole, in Burrington Combe, and Uphill,[192] to the joint labours of the two above-mentioned gentlemen, extending over the period which elapsed between 1821 and 1860. The vast quantity of remains which they obtained can only be realized by a visit to the Museum of the Somerset Archæological and Natural History Society, at Taunton.[193] They belong to the same species as those already mentioned from the caves of South Wales. The fauna of the Mendip is, however, characterized by the great number of lions, and by a few fragments of the glutton. Of the former animal, Mr. Ayshford Sanford and myself have met with sufficient remains to figure nearly every portion of the skeleton, and the skulls prove that it was not a tiger, as it is considered to be by some naturalists, but a true lion, differing in no respect, except in its large size, from those now living in Asia and Africa.

All these caverns consist of chambers at various levels more or less connected with fissures, and, from the perfect condition of the bones they must have been inaccessible to the bone-destroying hyæna. Their contents were introduced, as is suggested by Dr. Buckland, from the surface by streams falling into swallow-holes (see [Fig. 81]), which have now, under the changed physical conditions, ceased to flow.

The extraordinary quantity of remains preserved in one cave may be, to some extent, verified by a visit to that at Banwell. It consists of two large chambers, the upper one filled with thousands of bones of bison, horse, and reindeer, taken out of the red silt which originally filled it to the roof; the lower one full of the undisturbed contents, from which the bones project in the wildest confusion. This accumulation has been introduced by water, through a vertical fissure which opened on the surface. It is evident, from the very nearly perfect skulls of wolf and bear which were discovered, that the cave was not used as a den by the hyænas. They are, however, proved to have been living close by at the time, since their skulls, and the gnawed antlers of reindeer, have been discovered inside. They were probably swept in by the stream along with the other bones.